It's interesting to think that my children know more about the process than many mature critics.

You just have to know what you want and what you're doing and it leads to a kind of general well-being, which I think you sensed when you were there.

Dialogue is used to reveal not what we want to say, but what we are trying to hide.

I'm not a precious text protector, or anything like that, you know, because it's a much more vital form than that. You have to rock.

The novel ceases to be looked at as a novel. Such is the overwhelming power of motion pictures. Gore Vidal pointed out that the movies are the only thing anybody's really interested in. The association with movies and movie money can, and certainly did in my case, occlude a novel as a novel.

Star Wars was great at the beginning and crap at the end while Star Trek has always been interesting, and the difference is in the writing, and the thematic intentions.

Poetry died as a commercial form and then it died as a serious art form. No one serious touches it. It used to be that somebody like F. Scott Fitzgerald could make a high middle-class income from working as a short story writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other outlets. That doesn't happen anymore. It used to be that a legitimate playwright could make a living on Broadway from writing decent plays.